Friday, March 3, 2017

We started our year with parties and big plans

Both my girls enjoying a little pretend winter-snack in the igloo.

Ana´s Party

Hello again, it´s March already and we´ve been very busy with a lot of things, above here is a picture we took on Ana´s birthday. On the lawn outside where we live some people had made an amazing igloo.
For her birthday Ana had invited a good dozen of her friends, and we had two very busy hours with food, presents and crafts.
At the beginning of the year, when we started to ask Ana about what theme she wanted to have for her party she said she wanted a Bible-story party. Which was pretty good, considering that she wanted a Troll-themed party the year before. Marina found a bible-story series
that was written especially for girls of Ana´s age. It´s called Bible Belles.
Seeing her at her birthday this year made me think back of how she was on that day last year. And it has been so clear how much she has grown in her fifth year. I feel very privileged to be the one to parent her together with Marina.

Ana wanted to invite only girls at first,
but then wouldn´t allow herself to not have boys coming too.

We are looking like a proper international family here,
With both Marina and Ana from Brazil and Donal from Ireland.

Annemarie´s party

My sister´s wedding was the week before Ana´s birthday, and we were very happy to all be in the Netherlands for one week. Because I am living abroad, I don´t get to see my siblings as much as I would like. Especially not my little sister, who now lives in Ireland.

Plans for England (TESOL)

In my last post I mentioned that we are hoping to be involved with translating YWAM´s sourceview bible-app into Norwegian. This project won´t start until after the summer, and even then we are not certain how we will be able to contribute. But getting people excited about the bible is always good. Another bible related thing that we are going to be involved in the next few years is that we are going to offer a bible to each house in Hedmark (the county we live in).

YWAM Harpenden, here is where we plan to be for six weeks
in April and May of this year.

Another plan of ours, is that we have applied to be part of a TESOL-course. TESOL stands for Teaching English for Speakers of Other Languages, and aims to train people to teach english. Marina has worked as an english teacher in Brazil for years before her and Ana came to Norway. Now she wants to use her love for languages to reach the people that don´t know Jesus yet. In many countries (and especially in the middle east) extra english classes are much sought after, so working as an english teacher is a good way for many young christians to come in contact with people, that would otherwise be difficult as a "regular" missionary. Then after taking this course in England this year, we plan to be teaching the same course in Norway at Grimerud the year after.
The TESOL-course takes only six weeks, and we would go the YWAM-base in Harpenden with the whole family. Ana should be able to join school there, and I will work with Mot Målet from there.

Mot Målet (which I am not going to stop talking about)

It looks like it´s going to be a big year for our magazine. We (not me) got to dig into a big list of subscribers that we had lost contact with. And from working with that list we managed to gain back as many that we are now well over 10.000 subscribers. And that´s a really good number.
And while someone else has been doing that amazing job, I have been making a new website for our magazine. It was actually the first time that I designed a website. The new website should make it easier for our readers to read and share the articles online.